Clefairy

OoB monk was worse than touch ranger, imo. Ridiculous sustain, in its time. I was always kind of fond of the Balth's Aura exploit, even though it was patched out just before I started playing. The less said about IWAY the better.

Not really. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm reasonably certain the good behaviour clause in the LIVE EULA overrides the general decree of free speech, because you're using a service they set up for private use, as opposed to talking to your friend on a public street. This is just speculation, but given Microsoft's conservatism, I would guess that they think the bad press for a sudden draconian shift in their enforcement policies would outweigh the relative gains in users' experience online. I personally think that's a bad call, mostly for the reasons outlined in the video, but I can see why they would look at it in such a way.

I seem to remember reading that the general trend is that users (the ones talking about it online, anyway) will respond positively to paid DLC, but free DLC gets their dander up. It'll be interesting to see how long EA waits before the next paid DLC, whatever it ends up being.

Mass Effect is big enough and Bioware is respected enough that EA figured they could charge for it, and enough people would suck it up and pay in spite of the backlash. That's really all it is. EA wants your money, as much of it as you're willing to give. They've built up a lot of goodwill among the fanbase for producing quality content over the last two games, now they want to see how much juice they can squeeze out of us.

Why not. It's just been sitting on my hard drive for the longest time anyway. Professions? Any preferred campaign?

Comcast tech support was my first job out of high school. I worked in the same building as Grey Ninja, if anyone's been around long enough to remember him. Pretty sure I figured out who he was, but never met him personally. For the most part they're pretty good at maintaining infrastructure. But when they fail, they fail hard. Anyway, as I see it, until broadband penetration reaches 100% worldwide, you're fortunate to have reliable access. That's just how I look at the world, though. Count your blessings and all that. The response seems overblown now, because Blizzard still carries an enormous amount of good faith in the gaming community. Nevertheless, disallowing offline play is a blatant attempt to control how we use their product. If the product were inextricably linked to the servers that support it, like an MMO, that would be one thing. But the first two games weren't online only, so obviously that's not true. As consumers, we're conditioned to find more options preferable to less. Even if the option is largely unnecessary by today's standards of available internet, some people would prefer to have it. Myself included. That's really all there is to say.

All those other things are bureaucratic traits, though. Difficult to weaponize. I don't know about you, but given the choice of "Vogons take over OCR, absurd regulations stifle new music" and "Vogons take over OCR, destroy large swaths of internet with streaming poetry", the lesser of two evils seems fairly obvious.

I think we'll be okay. To my knowledge, none of the current judges have a predisposition to poetry. Sure, there's been a few instances of lyric-writing, but if you can write lyrics at all, there's no way you can aspire to the level of 3rd-worst poetry in the universe.

Valve doesn't release winners names, presumably to avoid lynching. There's a thread for this latest one, Steam General I believe... Aha. http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2267716

I really don't think the story is appropriate for a child of that age. 9 or 10, maybe, but 7 strikes me as too young. Non-skippable cutscenes too, so it's not like he can avoid it. OP: Recommend playing Other M yourself first, if you're considering it for him.

Hmm... If you can find it, Endless Ocean. Also this, except not Other M.

A thousand times this. It'll bust your crank.

It's about the loss of control for me. If I'm enjoying a game one night and the internet cuts out, as it sometimes does because no system of infrastructure works perfectly, I would like to continue enjoying it. Online only cripples that. Also, not everyone is so fortunate to have the same circumstances as you. There are large portions of the American midwest where dial-up is still the only way to get internet at all. And in some countries, bandwidth is tightly metered, with harsh penalties for going over your monthly limit. Making no effort at all to accomodate these groups is disconcerting at best. Particularly when, as the video says, there is no reason to disallow an offline mode. Except greed. Let's not trot out the tired excuses of duping/hacking/etc. either. People who want to exploit the system for their own personal gain will do so. Having everything run server-side just means it'll take them longer to find an exploit.

Diablo 3, is it? I'm interested to see where this goes. The game isn't even on my radar, because online-only for what they're offering is BS. Still, as you say, the results of their experiment will be felt across the industry. RE: people playing games for a living, I'm mostly concerned at how that's going to stifle the market. I forsee a lot of "don't buy from gougers, I need to eat this week" threads in the official forums.

Now, I don't work for Bethesda, so this is conjecture. But if I did, and I knew the modding scene was going to re-do all my work anyway, whereas I needed to knuckle down and get this thing out the door... Yeah, I'd slack a bit on the high-end models.

It's not so much that they're idiots, which may or may not be true. In film there's this thing called auteur theory, which basically says in spite of the sheer manpower required to make a movie happen, the director should get all the credit. It's his 'vision' that makes the product what it is, after all. Yeah, it's pretty crap. But over time, it's become accepted by the masses, and creeped into other fields. Like tech.

It's essentially a rogue-like in the style of the Underworld from the original Zelda. Items, map layouts, and bosses are randomized every time you play. I'd strongly recommend playing the demo before you jump onboard. It gets fairly challenging quickly, and there's liberal use of bodily fluids. I can't say it's inappropriate, given the scenario, but you may or may not be put off by it.

That's the Vortigaunt guy, I believe.

Even if they fire off a C&D, the game won't disappear. You'll just have to google a little harder, and endure a couple more porn ads to get it. Just like the Streets of Rage remake from earlier this year.

Megaman is unlocked by beating Arcade Mode with all 4 regular characters. Vaporeon apparently appears at random in Saffron City. Get the KO and you unlock it. Names whited out for spoilery folk.

Because any class can use any gun, it feels a bit more homogenous than TF2. But I feel it pushes the team aspect a lot harder; shooting mans is all well and good, and you'll certainly need to do it quite a bit to complete the objective, but to really excel you will need to rely on your teammates and their buffs. If you like A/D maps more than the other modes, but wish they had a bit more depth/complexity, I'd give it a whirl.

The previous 2 games, while fan favourites, did not even manage to break a quarter million units combined. (Unless you count the N64 port) Numbers matter, and this is what happens when good games don't get bought.

That's just theorycrafting, though. Like I said, it's difficult to process all the data; difficult, but not impossible, because it's just data. Human error, dropped connections, mind games in allchat, team drama... There's a wealth of metatextual stuff that affects the game beyond the raw numbers. At best, a tier list is like a commander's battle plan. And a guy much smarter than me once said, "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." So it all smacks of doing calculus for fun. If that's your thing, well, more power to you. But I don't see the appeal.

And even at that, what about champions with wildly different item paths? Do you evaluate each build seperately? Take the average? It's tremendously difficult to strain all the data and variables into "Champ A is better than Champ B at Task Y because Z." Not to mention, on a less explicitly friendly forum, it would just devolve into people bickering over who said what about whose main/favourites.

<3 Unholy War. Show me another game where a lizard (who is also a wizard!) calls down meteors from the sky to smite a rusted, sawblade-wielding killbot in the middle of a desert ruin. Or a sentient, rocket-launching tank gets torn apart by a charging rhinocerous. It was pretty unbalanced, in hindsight, but I didn't care in the least. I'll treasure that disc forever.